Memory Lane

My husband and I just got back from four days in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I know we just got back from Italy, but there was a concert in Massachusetts we wanted to see so we thought we would take my young friend and some of her friends to dinner as well. Visiting Harvard is always interesting though not always a barrel of laughs. The weather was very good, crisp fall air and sunshine, beautiful colors on the trees.

The concert was up practically in New Hampshire in a very small town named Salisbury. Part of the year it is a beach destination but luckily all the pizza shacks and soft serve ice cream joints were closed for the season. The concert was Tom Rush. Most readers have probably never heard of him but I had a huge crush on him when I was 13 or so, more than fifty years ago. He is and was an acoustic guitar, sort of folk singer. He also went to Harvard though he is nearly a decade older than either my husband or me so there was no overlap. Well he is around 75 now but that hasn't changed much. For a very short period in the 60's and early 70's he had a record contract with Elektra and some of his records had much bigger production style from what he started with or what he does now. The record company wanted him to be more of a rock guy but he was more of a coffee house type. Anyway, he still is an amazing guitar player, still sings reasonably well though his vocal range isn't quite what it was. And he is just a funny guy, good sense of humor, funny stories. We have been to a couple of concerts before and this wasn't a let down in any way. He joked that he was having his own grandchildren since he has a 16 year old daughter now.

While we were in Cambridge we visited my husband's old dorm, went to a couple of the buildings where his primary classes were, went to the Fogg Art Museum and Mt. Auburn Cemetery. The funniest episode was at the Natural History Museum. We were looking at the displays about evolution and came to two Galapagos tortoises. The didactic information on one of the tortoises had the name misspelled. It's not that I am such an expert on Galapagos tortoises but I was pretty sure that "Alebmarle" wasn't right. My husband tried to find it on his smartphone but couldn't and then I noticed that the tortoise still had one of those old manila tags wired to his neck. It was sort of tucked under the shell carapace but I was able to read the original information and sure enough it read "Albemarle" as I was sure it should. Naturally I sent an email to the museum staff. I am sort of a pain in the neck but there are so many school groups going through there that having errors just doesn't seem like a good idea.